This thesis addresses the relationship between Sri Lankan international domestic workers in
Cyprus and their Cypriot hosts. It illustrates the diversity of their daily experiences and analyses
their relationship through a conceptual framework of intimacy and distance. The ethnography
reveals how symbolic violence is expressed through various means of intimacy and distance in
the relationship between domestic workers and hosts from the macro-state level to the micro-
level of personal interactions. Hosts are automatically situated in a more powerful position in the
relationship and various factors reinforce their dominant positioning. Migrants are in a much
less powerful position and utilise the few resources available to them to enhance their chances of
'success' abroad. Social networking is often the most accessible resource to develop migrants'
opportunities abroad and has the capacity to contest hosts' authority. Cypriot hosts employ
domestic workers to enhance their lifestyle and also to reflect their affluent social status among
the larger host community. In the household, migrants are compelled to form intimate
relationships with hosts, while hosts may utilise strategic forms of intimacy with migrants. In
this way, hosts reinforce their power and authority over migrants through intimacy, while they
simultaneously demand social distance from workers. In the public sphere, hosts degrade
migrant identities, while these adverse associations disappear within hosts' households. Thus,
migrants assume ambivalent positions in which their roles within the host family and society
remain uncertain, insecure, and hesitant to define themselves. I conclude by arguing that this
ambivalence between intimacy and social distance demonstrates the symbolic violence that
migrants encounter from hosts. This tension in their relationship reflects hosts' more powerful
positions and desire to retain that position, while migrants understand their lower positioning and 1utilise the resources available to them to improve their social positionings back home.